Peter Lucas: 'Friends of Donald' now get media's welcome embrace

If President Donald Trump did not have phonies, frauds, fakers and deadbeats as friends, he wouldn't have had any friends at all.

Half of them were walking around with hidden tape recorders, including his personal attorney.

If these are his friends imagine what his enemies are like.

His attorney is tax deadbeat Michael Cohen, who is now in a close race with Paul Manafort to become the first FOD (Friend of Donald) to be sentenced to prison.

The odds favor Manafort, Trump's one-time campaign manager, who was already behind bars even before he was found guilty Tuesday of tax evasion and other financial fraud.

Unlike Manafort, though, Cohen seems to want to take Trump down with him.

Talk about draining the swamp.

And, after an investigation that has gone on for 18 months, U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller still has not come up with any evidence of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign in the 2016 election, which is what he was supposed to investigate in the first place.

Cohen and Manafort are simply collateral damage. They flew too close to the sun.

Politics is changing in politically divided America. In the good old days, it was paranoid President Richard Nixon who secretly taped White House aides and visitors,

Now it is paranoid aides like Omarosa Manigault-Newman who was secretly taping the president.

Cohen, unlike Omarosa, never got to the White House to tape the president, but did it by phone when Trump was still a private citizen and Cohen was on his payroll.

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Omarosa, who goes back to Trump's television days on the "Apprentice", was such a FOD that the president gave her a nothing job at the White House. So, Omarosa walked around and secretly taped everybody she came across, including Trump.

She was so good at it that she was able to sneak a tape recorder into the White House Situation Room to record Gen. John Kelly, chief of staff, gently firing her.

Even Vladimir Putin and the Russians couldn't do that.

Instead of firing her, Trump should have made her the director of the CIA.

For all Trump's kindness, Omarosa paid him back by publishing her tell-all book "Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House."

The media was breathless in reporting the Cohen and Manafort stories that broke the same day. They acted as though they were about to topple a president who mocked them. It was payback time and Cohen was the key.

Cohen, who Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani called a lying, "devious little rat," said at his arraignment on tax evasion, bank fraud and campaign finance violations, that Trump directed him to buy the silence of two women who Trump allegedly had affairs with years ago.

They are Stormy Daniels, who allegedly got $130,000, and former Playboy model Karen McDougal who was paid $150,000. The money was allegedly paid to buy their silence during Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.

If the money came from campaign funds, it could be a violation of campaign finance law. But it may not even be a violation since there are exceptions.

Even so, it is no big deal, and certainly not a "high crime and misdemeanor" that would lead to impeachment. Barack Obama was fined $375,000 for 2008 campaign finance violations, and the media shrugged.

In Trump's case it would be Cohen's word against Trump's.

No, all this smells like a last-ditch attempt by Mueller to get something -- anything -- on Trump to justify his investigation into Russian collusion that went nowhere.

But the bigger point is that Trump's America does not care about Russian collusion, Mueller, Manafort, or Cohen.

They believe these are media-hyped stories designed to bring down Trump.

What Trump America does care about is how Trump has improved their lives with tax cuts, jobs, a thriving economy, national security, the wall, a crackdown on sanctuary cities, illegal immigration and crime.

That is why it pained the television media to report the story, breaking at the same time, that an illegal immigrant from Mexico -- Christian Bahena Rivera -- was charged with first-degree murder in the brutal killing of missing college student Mollie Tibbetts and dumping her body in an Iowa cornfield.

That story was almost lost in the media hysteria over Cohen and Manafort. And that is because it does not fit or advance the narrative of progressive Democrats, in and out of the media, who call for open borders, sanctuary cities and the abolition of ICE..

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